Kick Apps Partners w/NBC Universal, not Conan O'Brien

Summary:There's no doubt in my mind NBC Universal had to do something given their falling ratings. The former kings of Thursday night TV not only sold themselves to Comcast, who, aside from Frank Eliason's superb rock star group of customer service people, sit near the bottom of customer service experience ratings all the time, but they are in the midst of probably what was the worst handling of a crisis of stars on late night TV ever, if not all times of TV.

There's no doubt in my mind NBC Universal had to do something given their falling ratings. The former kings of Thursday night TV not only sold themselves to Comcast, who, aside from Frank Eliason's superb rock star group of customer service people, sit near the bottom of customer service experience ratings all the time, but they are in the midst of probably what was the worst handling of a crisis of stars on late night TV ever, if not all times of TV. I mean of course, Jay Leno's and Conan O'Briiiiiiiiiii-en's ratings debacle - the one leading to Jay back at the Tonight Show and Conan leaving NBC for a cool $33 million.

Actually, kidding aside, this is a good deal for both NBC Universal and KickApps. NBC is getting what is a solid platform for community development, content development and management; one that integrates social media tools such as blogs, video and audio, and that provides a comments, ratings and ranking engine. They also have some useful and rather cool bells and whistles such as integration with Joomla and a social graph engine that creates a highly detailed social graph of a company's web property's network that can be used for targeted advertising, among other things. My (do)main concern is that while they have a pretty solid enterprise product they for some reason, haven't done what their competitors are all beginning to do which is to integrate with CRM systems, at least as far as I know. For a company of their size and quality, this is a bad oversight. Hopefully, they'll rectify that. But, even without that, they still provide the kind of scalable platform that will benefit enterprise level entertainment giants.

NBC Local Media attributes the growth of sites such as nbcnewyork.com (WNBC-TV), nbcchicago.com (WMAQ-TV) and nbcphiladelphia.com (WCAU-TV) to the inclusion of more social-media tools, allowing visitors to interact with one another and the content on the site.

Visitors to the 10 Web sites doubled from 6 million in Nov. 2008 to 12 million in Oct. 2009.

Page views are up 296 percent from 29 million to 113 million

Its hard to say with the language there whether or not KickApps is responsible for the growth, though I'd almost have to say "no" because of how its worded. Either way, KickApps is in a position to help NBC Universal engage their customers better than they have - which isn't saying much for NBC Universal, but says a lot about KickApps.

For KickApps, this is the kind of high profile win that propels them into the sight of both a larger audience and a more select audience who are influencers in various communities and various industry segments. A win-win. Plus KickApps, I presume, could make a boatload of revenue from this.

All in all, deals like this support the idea that customer engagement is top of mind for the enterprise. You think if Conan had known that this deal was coming down, he would have stayed?

In addition to being the author of the best-selling CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers Paul Greenberg is President of The 56 Group, LLC, a customer strategy consulting firm, focused on cutting edge CRM strategic services and a founding partner of the CRM training company, BP...
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Disclosure

Paul Greenberg has no investments in any firms that have CRM related or enterprise related applications or solutions, nor does he have any investments in any stock or other form of ownership in a consulting firms that does any form of enterprise application consulting or CRM consulting. However, at one time or another Paul has had almost all the significant CRM vendors as clients performing services as a consultant who would view and review and suggest product enhancements, changes or suggest how to cure product deficiencies; possible engagements to suggest go to market strategies for each company as they launched a new CRM solution. He has been engaged as a speaker at public events by these companies covering a mutually agreed upon topic and has written white papers sponsored by the vendors - which have no mention of the vendor and do not endorse the vendors products- but instead are based around thought leadership and ideas. None of these engagements whether they are consulting or works for hire, ever has impacted Paul's thinking good or bad, on any of these companies. Paul is in fact known for his honest straightforward public assessments of these companies. They are not immune to his public critique even when they are clients. When it is germane, Paul will disclose his relationship, if any, to a company that he might be writing about in either a positive or negative way.